blog navigation

Global Currents Blog
Featured Projects

blog posts

  • Chancellor's Call To Action Recipients (clockwise from top-left): Steve Witt, Faranak Miraftab, Ken Salo, Ellen Moodie, Barbara Hug, Annie Abbott, Melissa Goodnight, Scott Althaus, Vinisha Singh Basnet

    Congratulations to “The Chancellor’s Call to Action to Address Racism & Social Injustice Research Program” Awards Recipients

    The Center for Global Studies (CGS) congratulates Steve Witt, Director of CGS, CGS Faculty Affiliates Faranak Miraftab, Annie Abbott, Scott Althaus, Melissa Goodnight, Barbara Hug, Ellen Moodie, and Ken Salo, and former CGS Graduate Assistant Vinisha Singh Basnet, for receiving the 2022-2023 Chancellor Jones Call to Action Research Program awards.

  • SAOA logo

    SAOA: The South Asian Open Archives

    The South Asian Open Archive (SAOA) is an initiative that makes open access materials on South Asia available for teaching and research.

  • How do we know what we know about the climate change?

    This 8-module introductory course on numerous aspects of Climate Change is an attempt to educate students about the basics of this spiralling global problem. This was developed as part of the 2019-20 Global Intersections Program of the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

  • A word cloud made through text analysis of the items in the featured collection

    Surveying the Coming Storm: Works on Nationalism Prior to WWII

    With the benefit of hindsight, modern scholars can identify unbridled nationalism as a leading cause of World War II. However, it is crucial to explore whether scholars of the time foresaw the impending storm caused by nationalist movements in the first half of the 20th century and if they could have predicted the grave, mass-scale atrocities that unfolded. To shed light on the perspectives of scholars from a century ago, the IAS library has curated a Hathi Trust collection titled "Surveying the Coming Storm: Works on Nationalism Prior to WWII."

  • Kim Sheahan Sanford

    Spurlock Museum Big History Project

    Hi. I’m Kim Sheahan Sanford, the Spurlock Museum’s assistant director of education, and I have a confession to make. Sixth graders are my favorite students on earth. They are willing to suspend disbelief as I tell them a myth or a folktale, but they also latch onto adult concepts, like reincarnation and the development of complex writing systems.

  • The Housing Assembly, distributing food during the pandemic in informal settlements of Cape Town, South Africa

    Constructing transnational solidarities in radical care and democracy through digital feminist storytelling

    In this post, you will read about a Global Intersections project proposed by two graduate students in Urban and Regional Planning Department that received funding from CGS. Global Intersections is a Center for Global Studies (CGS) initiative designed to encourage multicultural, international, transnational, and global perspectives in student research. This project aims for creating a digital storytelling platform using a critical feminist storytelling methodology.

  • FLAS Alumni Career Panel Poster

    Career Opportunities in Foreign Language and Area Studies

    On October 26, 2021, Center for Global Studies (CGS) held a virtual “FLAS Alumni Career Panel,” that focused on the strategies for using foreign language and area studies skills on the job market for current and recent graduate students.  This blog post discusses this event and explores the key role that foreign language and area studies education can play in career succes.  

  • Students from Champaign-Urbana, Springfield, Austria, Britain, and Ukraine Competed in the Finals of Reimagine Our Future hosted at UIUC on December 2

  • Web Archiving and the Global Response to COVID-19

    One doesn’t need to look far to see how much the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the world, halting the mobility of people and goods that we took for granted as critical components of the global economy. This crisis has put a strain on nearly every system of our global society, impacting every sector of civil society. To attempt to preserve some of the initial reactions and concerns brought about the health emergency, the Center for Global Studies and the International and Area Studies Library began archiving websites of civil society organizations around the world as they respond to this crisis.

  • A map showing that institutions at 14 US states have been impacted by the ISRL.

    The Impact of the 2021 International Studies Research Lab

    Through the International Studies Research Lab (ISRL), the Center for Global Studies and collaborating centers leverage the campus’ expertise and vast library resources to support the development of international and area studies programming in community colleges across the country, providing access to important US Department of Education Title VI resources to institutions and regions without direct access to these important grant funds.

  • “Global Education Symposium,” October 14-17, 2020

    Proving stronger than an epidemic, the University of Illinois College of Education and Office of International Programs presented the “Global Education Symposium” on October 14-17, 2020.  Educators and students from around the world shared knowledge and personal thoughts, albeit, through the travel agent known as Zoom. 

  • University of Illinois’ CGS and CEAPS partner with Heartland to globalize education on campus by Zach Petrea, July 2023

  • Flyer for event

    CGS Hosted Dr. Eve Darian-Smith for Recent Talk, “World on Fire: Anti-Democracy and Anti- Environmentalism”

    The Center for Global Studies hosted Professor Eve Darian-Smith (Professor and Chair, Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine) as part of the MillerComm 2024 Lecture Series sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study on March 4th, 2023. This blog post summarizes the talk and provides further information on learning more about the topics discussed.

  • Successful Global Intersections Spring Project Awardees

  • States with Colleges Impacted by ISRL, 2016-2023

    Globalizing Curricula: The 2023 International Studies Research Lab

  • April 2021 iSEE Congress “The Future of Water”

    This year’s Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment at University of Illinois (iSEE) Congress was co-organized with the Center for Global Studies, in partnership with the Illinois Global Institute and the Joint Area Centers Symposium (JACS), four of which are funded through U.S. Department of Education Title VI grants.  The series of Zoom events brought together a diverse group of researchers, educators, journalists and activists to address global water crises under the rubric of “The Future of Water”, and to introduce the Illinois campus and community to cutting-edge thinking from highly influential scholars on topics ranging from drought to the global politics of water to pollution, public health, and biodiversity. 

  • EDU2.0 classroom

    Education 2.0 in Egypt: Research & Documentation Project

    Recent years have witnessed significant educational reforms in Egypt through the Education 2.0 initiative (often abbreviated EDU 2.0) that looks to expand skills-based learning and digital learning methods. University of Illinois Professor of Education Linda Herrera has worked with Dr. Tarek Shawki, Minister of Education and Technical Education (2017-2022) to not just chronicle the monumental educational reform, but also create an archive of primary source materials about this transformation that intends to benefit students, instructors, researchers, and stakeholders in the education sector.

  • Professor Manfred Steger speaks about reglobalization.

    Professor Manfred Steger's recent visit culminated with his talk "Globalization at a Crossroads: Deglobalization or Reglobalization?”

    The Center for Global Studies hosted prominent globalization scholar Professor Manfred Steger (Professor and Chair, Sociology, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa), co-sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study. On Monday, October 7th, Professor Steger gave a talk titled “Globalization at a Crossroads: Deglobalization or Reglobalization?” making a case that the world is in an era of reglobalization fueled by exponentially increasing “disembodied globalization.” 

  • ISRL 2024 cohort and staff and faculty organizers

    International Studies Research Lab hosts 12 fellows from across U.S.

    The Center for Global Studies ran the International Studies Research Lab (ISRL) this summer, making its first full in-person session since the Covid-19 pandemic. This blog post summarizes the lab, its purpose, and highlights three of the eleven projects developed through the ISRL.